He got his $500,000 bonus from his employers, the Koch brothers. He might as well retire with the Republicans poised for epic losses in the mid-terms. And he was able to bring the country one step closer to his Ayn Rand dystopian wet dream by helping pass the "Middle Class Tax Increase and Loss of Jobs Act". He won't be missed.

I just hope that when the Democrats take over again they kick all of the ex-Congresspeople off of any pension and medical plans and give Paul a voucher to go buy his own medical insurance on the individual market. That is if his pre-existing hemorrhoid condition doesn't preclude him from buying medical insurance.

"Paul Ryan's Retirement Just Leaves Republicans with Even Worse Choices post-2018: The House speaker's plan to retire leaves a white supremacist running for his seat and two unlikeable colleagues to replace him" by Jeb Lund, nbcnews.com, April 11, 2018

I've got a lot of close highly educated cowokers and friends, Lawyers, Doctors, Engineers,Some are even progressive, yet we can have a good conversation of todays politcs, with out personal attacks. All my kids have Higher Education, (Thank god none of them are progressive).

Don't fret Gunnar. Your not the first superior individual from a top Montana Collage I had to deal with. I sued his a$$ and won. He got fired. Never hurts to have friends like Michael Moses. He be BIG CHIEF JUDGE. Retired last year.

Snowy, I don't think you got the gist of what was said. I don't believe there is a progressive here that has a problem with assisting a person that was supported by a social safety program due to a family loss. I believe the problem is that the person that received the help doesn't want the next person to receive any help. What do you suppose the reason for that is? Is he afraid of educated people? Is he afraid somebody will earn more than him? Is he afraid if he doesn't cut programs, his retirement will be diminished? Please explain his thinking if you will. And I don't want to hear that he is looking out for the deficit. Especially after our current (Republican Controlled Congress) has increased the deficit with their new omnibus bill.

About Ryan: Incredibly, I’m seeing some news reports about his exit that portray him as a serious policy wonk and fiscal hawk who, sadly, found himself unable to fulfill his mission in the Trump era. Unbelievable.

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare.

And his “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgment into question.

So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.

"Paul Ryan cultivated an image that was false in some major ways. He pretended to be a budget hawk but consistently supported tax cuts that increased the deficit. He pretended to care about poverty but opposed many policies that had a record of reducing poverty. (Paul Krugman has long written about this hypocrisy, and Matthew Yglesias has a new piece on it in Vox.)

But I don’t agree with the notion that Ryan is a complete hypocrite. He’s long displayed one admirable trait: A strain of honesty. He has acknowledged his desire to shrink popular programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Many other Republicans refuse to admit as much. They claim that the government can cut taxes deeply for the rich and that Medicare and Social Security can somehow magically remain exactly as they are. You saw Republicans in Congress and Trump administration officials make precisely this case last year, during the rush to pass a tax cut.

Ryan, by contrast, proposed radical cuts to Medicare, in his various budget blueprints over the years. He proposed the privatization of Social Security. And, in December, even before Congress passed the tax bill, Ryan said that changes to Medicare and Social Security would be his top priority in 2018. He wasn’t afraid of talking simultaneously about tax cuts and spending cuts — and allowing voters to draw a connection between the two.

These acknowledgments allowed a more honest debate about tax policy than many other Republicans wanted. But an honest debate is a better one. The reality is that today’s Republican Party supports both big tax cuts for the wealthy and the unavoidable counterpart — cuts to health care, retirement and other programs for the middle class and poor."

Read more at:

"Paul Ryan Is Not a Complete Hypocrite" by David Leonhardt New York Times, April, 12, 2018